The journey begins with the events of the 2013 Boston Marathon, which the author follows live behind the safety of his computer screen, and takes him down the rabbit holes of modern and contemporary art of the world’s premiere museums, from the most hallowed spaces of the American arts to spectacular career heights in European literature, from New York City to Brussels, from Ventspils to Frankfurt & Leipzig, fighting for his life and mind through the darkest moments of the Trump era, through the nascent digital landscapes of psychological and emotional manipulation and the reinforced structures of political and financial control, and coming out badly beaten and psychologically scarred, perhaps traumatized for life, yet just as outraged at the sorry state of contemporary society as he was when he first picked up his pen.
“Whoever I turned to did not believe me,
so I walked through the nightmare alone.
Those were the times, and this is a record of those times.”
An essay on writer’s anxiety in the post-Snowden age, with a brief recap on how the events of the 2013 Boston Marathon unfolded on Reddit, a look at the works of Don DeLillo and PEN America’s Global Chilling report, and a principled defense of the freedom of the artist and the arts.
The two stories.
A visual essay on New York City in the month of the 2016 presidential election.
A visual poem, written in the months after the election of Donald Trump as President of the USA, and designed in the spring Covid-19 quarantine months as a tribute to New York, the wildest city in the world.
An extended essay, recounting the experiences of the author after submitting two short stories on the eve of the presidential election in New York City to The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harper’s Magazine, DeLillo, Schnabel and Columbia University, that stayed with him through a Passa Porta literary residency in Brussels, Belgium, six months later. A tale of either beautiful madness or something else.
A novella telling the story of an introverted IKEA designer on a train across Europe who is slowly being nudged into insanity by a fellow passenger after witnessing a crime.